I’m running the VM on a AMD 5800H Trigkey S5 with 64GB of RAM
The Host SSD is a CT4000P3PSSD8 - Crucial P3 Plus 4TB PCIe M.2 2280 SSD that is half full
I have the VM setup with 4 vCPUs with 1 core per processor and 4GB of RAM - the storage is showing Storage 6.6 GB of 30.8 GB used
Core 2025.10.2 - I’m currently upgrading to 2025.10.4
There are 3 Windows 11 VMs on the host that run fine
There is 17GB of RAM on host available / cached
I keep getting these errors “failed command write fpdma queued”
I found this article for virual box about these errors
I’ve found a usable workaround to be switching my disks in VirtualBox to IDE. The virtual IDE “can” still time out, but IDE’s multisector read and write mode max at like 16 sectors (8KB), or maybe 256 sectors (128KB), versus SATA allowing for 64MB or more via larger transfers and native command queueing; that’s 1/512th the data in that queue. In days of yore, SATA gave a massive speed increase in VMs compared to IDE (the 8KB transfers plus mucking about with I/O ports meant a lot of virtualization overhead); with VT-X flipped on the difference is low enough; I haven’t run some synthetic disk I/O benchmark but in real use I can’t tell the difference in terms of speed or CPU usage. If my physical disk I/O is nice, the IDE runs nice; if the disk I/O is slow, the OS in the virtual box (Linux or Windows) simply run through their read and write queues pretty slowly, rather than spitting out large 64MB requests then timing out.
Root cause is the Linux write cache (on the host) becoming quite large, then disk I/O is quite slow during the time that cache flushes out. If any disk I/O from a VirtualBox takes over ~15 seconds, the Linux or Windows OS in the virtual machine assumes the SATA drive failed and counts it as a read or write error.
For a Linux VM, you just add the IDE controller, remove your disk (and CD if you want) from SATA and add them onto IDE. Remove the SATA controller if you want. Done.
For Windows 7, add IDE, boot into 7. Make sure it installs the IDE driver. Shut down and move the disks to IDE, remove SATA if you want.
For 10, google windows 10 sata to ide, and where they talk about mucking about in the BIOS muck about in VirtualBox storage settings instead; you have to add the IDE controller, boot, run a bcdedit command, power down, switch the disks to the IDE controller (and remove SATA if you want), it boots into a safe mode once, then run a bcdedit command again so it boots into normal mode.
Anyone any thoughts?